Euroviews. We could crowdfund a progressive Europe for the people, by the people

We are on the cusp of a small donor revolution in politics and civil society. 

Campaign funding, once the preserve of the state and a handful of wealthy individuals, is now increasingly shaped by grassroots payments — ranging from one-off contributions, equivalent to the price of a coffee, all the way through to regular standing orders in support of policy aims or wider social causes.

This shift, sparked by the advent of social media and other digital tools, is widening civic engagement in particular causes or politically-driven campaigns and has the added benefit of providing donor groups with swifter and more detailed feedback on the initiatives they are seeking to push.

In Europe, the harnessing of mass donor engagement, as a campaign tool, is still in relative infancy — particularly when stacked against the fundraising activity and movements of political groups in the US.

To give a sense of the scale, for 2018-2021, small donations to European party groupings accounted for less than 1% of total donations. 

By group breakdown, they represented just 11% of total receipts for the European Christian Political Movement, 2% for Renew Europe, and 1% for the European Free Alliance, the European Green Party and Identity and Democracy groups, respectively.

Across the Atlantic, the picture is significantly different. Small, single-member grassroots contributions, which are now entering their thirtieth year as a feature in political movements, today constitute up to 78% of funds in the cases of some campaigns.

A breakthrough moment in the US arguably came in 2012, when Barack Obama collected 23,000 small-sized donations in the first 24 hours of his reelection campaign. 

This trend spiked upward, four years later, with the ground